Automobile accidents are one of the most serious problems facing society today, both in terms of deaths and injuries, and in financial losses suffered as a result of accidents. The suffering caused by death or injury from such accidents is immense. Further, the costs related to medical treatment, permanent injury to accident victims and the resulting loss of employment opportunities and financial losses resulting from damage to property involved in such accidents are high. Providing the improved systems and methods to eventually eliminate these deaths, injuries and other losses deserves high priority. The increase in population and use of automobiles worldwide with the concomitant increased congestion on roadways makes development of systems for collision avoidance and elimination even more urgent. While many advances have been made in vehicle safety, including, for example, the use of seatbelts, airbags, and safer automobile structures, much room for improvement exists in automotive safety and accident prevention systems.
When a person begins a trip using an automobile, that person enters the vehicle and begins to drive. First, the vehicle moves out of a parking space and then, typically, onto a local or city road and then onto a highway. In leaving the parking space, the person may be at risk from impact of a vehicle traveling on the road. The operator must check his or her mirrors to avoid such an event. Several electronic sensing systems have been proposed which would warn the operator when a collision is likely. Once on the local road, the operator is at risk of being impacted from the front, side, and rear. Electronic sensors are available and are constantly being further developed to warn the operator of such possibilities. Similarly, the operator may run into a pedestrian, bicyclist, deer or other movable object and various sensors are also available that will warn the operator of these potential threats. The sensors include units that operate at radar, optical, infrared, ultraviolet or other electromagnetic frequencies. In addition there are other non-electromagnetic devices such as ultrasonic, motion and a variety of other sensors, each of which attempts to remove a eliminate collision events. Once the sensors detect an imminent event, appropriate counter-measures may be enacted, such as warning the operator through sensory stimuli or through automated action from a control program.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,202,776 discloses a method and system for obtaining information about objects external to a vehicle. The method and system includes directing a laser beam from the vehicle into the environment, receiving from an object in the path of the laser beam a reflection of the laser beam at a location on the vehicle, and analyzing the received laser beam reflections to obtain information about the object from which the laser beam is being reflected.
In another example U.S. Pat. No. 7,188,012 discloses an adaptive voice control and vehicle collision warning and countermeasure system. The safety system includes a voice sensor that detects voice signals from a vehicle occupant. An occupant classifier determines the state of mind of the vehicle occupant. A controller performs a safety countermeasure in response to the state of mind of the occupant including the transmission of the state of mind to a target vehicle.
It should be noted that the prior countermeasures all rely on independent action from either the operator or the control programs to prevent collision events, rather than holistic integrated action from the human and machine combined. Such independent action by either the operator or the machine can lead to unintended consequences. For example, it is nearly impossible to program a machine to take into account all the variables of which an operator can be aware, and it is consequently inadvisable to make vehicle operating decisions based on machine output alone. Further, if the machine merely advises the vehicle operator verbally, the operator's reaction time may be too slow to evaluate and decide whether or not to use the machine advice. This could cause accidents to occur that the incorporation of the machine advice into the holistic performance of the vehicle could have avoided.
A more holistic system that allows the machine to advise and affect the operator's actions as the operator takes them but still leaves the operator in ultimate control is needed.